Tuesday, April 30, 2013

In this rare and special JDCMB guest post, Ilona Oltuski from New York pays tribute to the late Dorothy Taubman's work in seeking to help pianists avoid injury at their instrument.

In The Right Hands – Music-Pedagogues Save Musicians
From Injury By Ilona Oltuski

“Life
does not end with injury – you can get out of it!”
Alexey Koltakov, pianist

Thanks to the late Dorothy Taubman’s essential
body of work whose convincing insights convey the underlying principles of a
‘natural’ piano technique, there are no more secrets in today’s world of music
to how pianists can avoid getting injured at the keyboard.

Based on physics and physiology, Taubman’s “natural” approach,
which includes an understanding of all kinds of tension-related, repetitive-motion-syndrome
injuries, and can be applied to other instrumentalists as well, identifies where
personal limitations can be overcome by avoiding tense and restricting
movements.Her theory encourages
musicians to avoid bending fingers in--or rather out--of shape, with over-exerting
exercises, and detrimental, endless repetitions, of inherently wrong movements.

And yet, it still happens all the time!Young musicians get caught up in intense
training at their instrument without heeding serious warning signs, and as
pianist Alexey Koltakov puts it, end up “taking a course towards the iceberg!”

The Ukrainian pianist felt his first
symptoms of problems while partaking in the 2001 Van Cliburn competition. “I
felt some sort of limitation in my right hand – compared to my left. I could
not play octaves as freely, but at first it was just minimal. I was told to
practice more by my teacher, Viktor Makarov, who used special training methods
to build a faster technique and better endurance, and who had a good track
record of other competition winners. Some years later, I was supposed to
perform at the Arthur Rubinstein competition and three days before the supposed
performance, I found myself unable to play any octaves at all. I had not wanted
to face the fact that something was really wrong; but I could not control my
right hand properly. I came to Veda (Kaplinsky) and she had a pretty good idea
right there – focal dystonia – later also diagnosed by a neurologist. I had let
things go too far, and the only recovery possibility was that I had to re-learn
my motions for playing the piano. Where I had been curling my fingers with
excessive pressure and tension before, pulling the fingers from the key, I had
to consciously regain a tension-free approach. After a five-year period, I now retrieve
an enormous amount of pleasure from playing the piano, again. Now I need around3-4 hours of daily practice and I get much better
results. I feel much more secure in my music making, able to express nuanced
sound, in the way I choose to. My octaves are strong and there is none of the
previous tension in my forearm. It’s a completely different, effortless touch,”
says Koltakov, who gives testimony to the fact that Taubman’s principles, when
well-applied by specialized pedagogues, can make all the difference. Koltakov shares his experiences with other
musicians freely, hoping they will avoid undergoing his hardship. He wants to
get the word out that there is help available and reassure them that, “life
does not end with injury – you can get out of it!”

“Alexey went into denial and started to
compensate, never questioning what he was taught. He had to retrain his
muscles, - not unlike a stroke victim, and it took a lot of perseverance on his
part and almost three years. But when I listen to him play today his hands are
completely healthy, and I am moved to tears,” says Veda Kaplinsky, Chair of
Juilliard’s Piano Department.

“Taubman changed my own life and put me on
the course, that I am on today,” Kaplinsky continues, “Until I met her, I
was under the assumption that you were either talented or not, and that there
were no “technical problems”, only technical deficiencies. One had to practice
blindly to overcome them and only later did I understand the importance of
examining how you move and approach your physical contact with the instrument.
Understanding Taubman’s approach, I was confident and able to explain to my
students the reason behind it all. That made a huge difference in my ability to
penetrate walls of resistance which I sometimes encounter, when introducing
sometimes drastic, necessary changes. Of course, I have an average of 30
students a year and you develop your own way of imparting the information and
every student needs something else. I can’t separate anymore where Taubman ends
and I begin, but some of the basic principle images and expressions I use up to
this day. I remember how the title, for the planned but never published book
about her approach, inspired me: ‘The piano plays you,’ got me thinking: that
brilliant concept of using the mechanics of the piano instead of fighting the
instrument is so foreign to what I was used to, yet worked so well. It was rebellious to many things we did
intuitively, and were trained to do. It was predominantly her diagnostic
ability that impressed me. She could look at a pair of hands and immediately know
what’s wrong and what needs fixing.” Kaplinsky herself claims to have developed
a bit of that x-ray vision, which allows her to quickly recognize the causes of
pain and tension, even if the artists themselves ignore their symptoms.

“Physical discomfort prevents you from
controlling the instrument in a way that enables you to express yourself
musically,” she says. An artist’s physical habits at the piano become very much
part of their perception of how expressive they can be. If something goes
wrong, the whole essence of the musician’s well being is endangered. It’s
important for people to realize that changing their injurious physical habits
will not endanger their ability to express. On the contrary, freeing one’s
hands enables them to explore greater possibilities and to be more consistent.
Discomfort leads to loss of control and motivation to practice. But ultimately
this knowledge hast to become so ingrained, like second nature. Moving
correctly means removing all harshness and roughness from your sound, balance
well and avoid all glitches from your finger work; in short, it is to achieve
everything from pearly articulation to powerful projection,” which is, of
course, a pianist’s dream come true.

In some cases, Kaplinsky will refer some of
her students to Taubman specialist Edna Golandsky, who
was Dorothy Taubman’s close protégé, assistant and co-lecturer for many years.
Golandsky, co-founder of the Golandsky
Institute, which offers its annual summer residence at Princeton-University,
teaches out of her studio in New York.

Photo: Dorothy Taubman(left), Edna
Golandsky(right)

Kaplinsky, who knew Taubman before she
recently passed away at the age of 95, had initially heard about her work from Golandsky,
who studied with her “already 45 years ago,” says Kaplinsky, who initially was
critical of what she had heard. Accompanying her college roommate in an attempt
to “save her” from falling into the “cult” of Taubman, Kaplinsky changed her
mind the moment she was “greeted by this very warm and sweet lady, who was not
at all what I had envisioned.”Kaplinsky
says, “I remember, how the sound of my roommate at the piano changed
immediately, after Taubman was touching her elbow slightly. I was in total
amazement – asking her, would you listen to me too? – That’s when I started studying
with her.”

Even
though Kaplinsky did not publicly announce Taubman training as part of her
specialty, it was always a well-known fact that she believed strongly in the
Taubman principles, and integrated them into her teaching. Kaplinsky was
recorded at the Piano World Conference, talking about her personal relationship
with Taubman, and embracing her method.That
recording is now out of circulation, but there are a number of recordings that
have been released by the Golandsky Institute that are a great starting point
for familiarizing oneself with Taubman’s principles; some are also available on
the Naxos
library website, and are accessible through music colleges and public institutions.

What counts are true results! Alexey Koltakov
performed in a concert
this week at Juilliard's Morse Hall, and
announced on his Facebook page: “Tonight I had my first ‘controlled’ public
performance after five years of focal dystonia in my right hand!"

Michael Haas's Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis is being published on 7 May and is an absolute must-read for anyone with an interest in setting the record straight about the nature of music in the 20th century. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first major scholarly book to address its specific question. I have a short feature about it in The Independent today. Here to go with it is a spot of appropriate opera: Korngold, in longing-for-the-past mode. This is "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen, es träumt sich zurück" from Die tote Stadt - the Pierrot Tanzlied, sung in this (unfortunately uncredited) production by [shock] a Pierrot. I'll never forget hearing Olaf Bär in Zurich having to sing this dressed in drag with basque, tights, six-inch black heels and butterfly wings, but that's another story.

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I write words for, with and about music. My work has appeared in The Independent, The JC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and numerous music magazines and I'm the author of novels, biographies and stage works. Libretto for 'Silver Birch', Roxanna Panufnik's opera for Garsington 2017, was described as 'powerful and poetic' by The Times. Latest novel 'Ghost Variations' (Unbound). Currently crowdfunding 'Meeting Odette', a 21st-century fairytale.
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